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November 2007

Thursday, 15 November 2007

I got accused the other day, in a comment I didn't publish, of being (I think) a venal shill turning this website over to the pursuit of profit. This as a result of publishing links to Amazon for the two Robert Adams books on November 8th.

Well, for the record, between then and yesterday, six people bought Why People Photograph through our Amazon link, and one (!) person bought Beauty in Photography through our link. T.O.P.'s "take" (through the Amazon Associates program) came to a grand total of $4.76.

Not that I don't appreciate it. I do, really I do. But such links are at least as much for your convenience as for my profit, honestly.

Did you ever wonder how a major photography exhibit (or any transient art exhibit, for that matter) gets produced at a museum?

Who does what? Who pays for what? Who gets paid for what? How do the pictures ultimately get put onto the museum gallery walls?

There is no standard formula. Each exhibit presents curatorial staffs with unique mixtures of challenges that can seem more kindred to a Broadway theater production than to a museum exhibit. Indeed, to attract more visitors, major exhibitions are becoming multimedia extravaganzas often involving published catalogs (which are often completely authored books), various presentations by the artist and curators, video presentations, commemorative posters, dinners, community outreach tours, etc. The Jeff Wall exhibit that recently toured through the Art Institute of Chicago, and is now in San Francisco, is a good example of just such a complex show.

But what about the money? Even modest exhibits are far more expensive than most people realize. As a small sampling, budgets must be allocated for matters such as assembling, insuring, and transporting the art, preparing the gallery (painting, graphics, electrical requirements), and publicizing the exhibit. If the exhibition is a significant one-person show at a larger museum there will probably also be a budget for travel and per diem expenses, as well as an honorarium, for someone (the artist, an archival curator, a scholar of the work, etc.) to present a lecture or attend some similar event at the museum. These are generally not lavish sums (unless the museum is in the Middle East). The spirit of museum exhibitions tends to be one of academic recognition and retrospection rather than loot.

Where does the money come from? The answer will vary for each museum and each exhibition. Sometimes a single corporate sponsor will foot nearly the entire bill for an exhibit, particularly if the artist’s work can relate to promoting the company. But more often a museum will have to quilt together patches of funds to make an exhibit happen. Museums, particularly the larger ones, have multiple pockets of funds from which a department can draw for an exhibit. Private donors, for example, sometimes establish departmental-level funds directed towards supporting exhibition expenses. A photographer’s gallery, as another example, might be coaxed to pick up travel expenses and schedule other events in the area to promote the photographer’s work to collectors.

The expense and complexity of major exhibitions is greatly diffused when several museums collaborate. The Jeff Wall exhibit is an excellent example. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collaborated to put this large, expensive show together. Each museum is hosting the show for several months. But each shared in, and benefited from, the logistical equity established by the group.

The people to truly salute for a good exhibit are the museums' curatorial staffs. From afar you might have the impression that they live in an insular world where they spend their days walking about stroking their chins and saying "Hmmmm" a lot. Some do. But most are up to their necks in alligators every week chasing down the thousands of details required for nearly every exhibit. In their "spare" time they’re responsible for other jobs such as courting and catering to donors (who can be a prickly lot), giving talks, mastering knowledge of the museum’s collection, and keeping abreast of their respective segments of the art market. A strong, savvy, imaginative curatorial staff can propel a museum to new stature in just a few years.

So there's a very cursory glimpse under the skirts of museum exhibitions. It's actually a fascinating, nerve-wracking undertaking not meant for the squeamish.

_____________________

Ken

Ken Tanaka is a semi-professional photographer whose work was shown most recently in a Frank Gehry retrospective exhibit at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. He is also actively involved with the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Photography.

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

Lightcrafts currently has a special offer (bottom of the page at the link) on Lightzone image editor software for users of Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, whereby users can buy Lightzone Basic for $99 rather than the usual price of $149. The offer expires on November 15th, however, and you have to fax or e-mail them a proof of purchase one day ahead of time, so you need to act fast if you want to take advantage of the offer.

The latest version of Lightzone (3.1) is a great improvement—a summary is here. Right now, $99 is practically pocket change when converted into Euros or Canadian dollars.

Sorry we're so late posting this.

____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Adam McAnaney: "For a good description of how/why to use LightZone together with Lightroom, see here.

"I probably should have tried out the demo version earlier, but with the special offer due to expire on the 15th, I decided to just jump right in. $100 is really quite reasonable compared to most photo-editing programs.

"LightZone complements Lightroom because it allows you to make local adjustments or edits in pictures, whereas Lightroom only allows you to make global changes. I have become increasingly frustrated with this. For example, if you have two sections of a picture with roughly the same tonality, and want to adjust one without affecting the other, you have no way of doing this in Lightroom. You can, of course, do this in Photoshop, but LightZone appears to offer a faster and more intuitive way of doing so. Oh, and it's only $100 (Euro 68) if you act now, as compared to hundreds for Photoshop (yes, I realize that Photoshop offers much more than LightZone).

"I also do a fair amount of B&W work, and as indicated above, LightZone offers a lot of advantages to B&W photographers. With the update to version 3.1 (and now 3.2), the authors have added a lot of features to extend this usability to color photographers. Accordingly, if you search the web for reviews, be sure to check what version number is being reviewed. It seems that version 3.1/3.2 is a very different beast compared to versions 1.x and 2.x.

"The point is that LightZone doesn't replace Lightroom, it complements it. And if you click on the link above from OutbackPhoto, you will see that it is fairly easy to pass pictures from one program to the other.

"Note: Since I only downloaded LightZone last night, I can't say how well it works in practice. I just wanted to share my thought process with those who were asking why one might want to buy LightZone if you already have Lightroom."

After playing around with scanning some of my old Michigan negatives, I've been considering buying a view camera, to make negatives for scanning on the V700. Camera shopping makes me feel "schizophrenic" in the common-parlance usage of that term (we use it to mean "torn in two directions" or "exhibiting an incompatible dual nature" which is really not fair to the clinical meaning, and obscures the real disease...man, I am really going to have to watch it with these constant digressions).

Anyway, part of me suffers from standard choice-angst like any other amateur aficionado. Adam McAnaney told me the other day about the German expression "Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual." I actually very much like the literal translation, supplied by auto-translator: "Who has the selection, the agony has," although Adam's more succinct "Choice is torture" is, er, less tortuous.

But the other half of me has the opposite problem, which is a certain contempt for the choosing. My experience over the years is that I've been able to make pictures with darn near any camera I like well enough to use, and I don't really care about all the fastidious details. (Well, except when I'm shopping.)

I'm not saying I don't like cameras as well as the next geek or gearhead. I do. But there's also a part of me that realizes that "all cameras suck," as one famous photographer once put it to me—or, more precisely, every camera takes a stab at some theoretical ideal and—this is the important part—falls short.

I've had some pretty nice cameras over the years, but I've also had some wretched ones. For a time I shot with a quite cruddy-looking broken Pentax SPII (an M42 screwmount camera, for those of you who remember such things) that had a broken meter and large pieces missing from the lens, and I took some of my all-time favorite pictures with it. More recently, in 2003 or thereabouts, my first digicam was a cheesy 3-megapixel Olympus that had a shutter lag that should have been measured in fractions of a month. But I took some pictures I still love with that one, too.

On a steel horse I ride...I did a number of totally gorgeous prints from negatives shot with a beat-near-death screwmount Pentax. The Super-Takumar lens actually had pieces missing.

I did my unofficial apprenticeship with a studio photographer who had been one of my teachers in art school, who did all of his large-format jobs with a camera that was so compromised that the arcana of its use amounted to a secret initiation or series of shibboleths; to get it to work there were a dozen things you needed to know about how to get around its manifold infirmities. He did most of his work with it. It was absolutely ancient. It had been cheap when it was new, and, when I made its acquaintance, it was bruised and battered, held together with the proverbial baling wire, chewing gum, and duct tape. It was really a disgrace. I hated it rather spiritedly. I remember once—in front of a client—having to put a wide-angle lens on the thing, which then put the front part of the rail in the picture; but the standards couldn't be moved forward enough to eliminate this problem because the rail was dented. I had to excuse myself and put in an agitated phone call to my partner hoping very much that I wasn't going to have to scrub the job because I didn't know how to get the rail out of the bottom of the picture, and he patiently explained to me how to disassemble the standards and the rail and put it all together again on the right side of the dent. Ah, so that was the trick. Yet another initiation rite surmounted.

The second or third digital camera I ever tried was my doctor-brother's Nikon 950, and I had a blast with that thing, although I think most of the pictures ended up getting erased, justifiably. He had to pry it out of my grasping fingers to get it back. That tradition goes back a ways with me: when my cousin Katie got a Kodak disc camera for Christmas when she was about ten (it was the latest thing at the time), she asked me if I'd like to take some pictures with it, and before either of us knew it I'd exposed all three of the discs she got with it. She was shocked, as three discs' worth of film probably would have lasted her until the leaves were turning colors the following Fall. I hope I replaced the film for her, although I don't remember.

I'm not saying I'd frame any disc-camera pictures and put them on the wall, obviously. Horses for courses, and some nags won't run.

Shot with a 3-megapixel Oly digicam. It ain't going on any museum wall, but it's a nice snapshot.

The tradition of "making do" has a long and honorable history among the illustrious, too. For every bonafide equipment freak like Ansel Adams, there's an Edward Weston who bought his most-used lens for $5.00 at a Mexican flea market (granted, those were the days when $5.00 would rent you a room in a rooming-house for a week, but still). He managed to take some nice pictures with it, somehow. Alfred Stieglitz's camera was so decrepit that he kept a string tied around the middle of the patched and saggy bellows, which he had to hold up with his free hand while he pressed the bulb with the other hand. He took some decent pictures, too, did Stieglitz.

And here's where I have to admit my prejudice. I actually like my cameras to be well-worn. I like plain, hard-wearing, utilitarian objects. I'm contemptuous when I see people proudly protecting their minty babied gear from the incursion of a scratch or a ding. I bought a couple of new Olympus OM-4T's once, and I sat around watching TV in the evening scratching the paint off with a nickel (the "champagne" color of a titanium OM-4T is paint; raw titanium shows fingerprints). Yeah, yeah, I know that deliberately aging a camera is every bit as precious and affected as trying to keep it in pristine condition (I justified my Olympus vandalism by calling it theft-proofing). But I like my users to look like veterans. Perfect cameras are embarrassing. Hey, I said it was a prejudice.

Part of me suspects that the anxiousness of shoppers to buy the very best camera possible—down to fractional measures of obscure capabilities, and shouting matches online with recalcitrant jerks who just refuse to see the superiority of one choice over another—comes down to insecurity. I can actually feel that with view cameras, because they're one type of camera I've never been very confident with.

Another significant aspect of that anxiousness/insecurity is that it's hopeless. Half the time, when I use really expensive, deluxe cameras—and I've used a fair number over the years, both when I've owned them or when I've reviewed them—what impresses me is not entirely how wonderful and pleasing they are, but also that they still have obvious flaws, or at least idiosyncrasies that you'd have to get used to working with. Cameras are unexceptional in this respect: even the best ones will break, or need service, or will get some feature wrong for our individualized taste, or be missing some feature that is familiar to us from a lesser example that would have been easy enough for the makers to include. They are, in other words, still just cameras.

The only perfect camera is one that you've been using for so long that it fits like an old shoe and you're so used to its foibles that you forget there's any other way.

So I end up feeling that my obsessive shopping is something of a fool's errand—especially when it comes to view cameras. Show me any view camera that works and, hell, I'll make do. Even if it's not the latest thing with all the proper features. And especially if it's in good enough shape that doesn't actually need any baling wire, chewing gum, and duct tape....

Monday, 12 November 2007

Meyerowitz at large These are sponsored by HP, so of course there's the usual product-pushing going on, but the article and video of Joel Meyerowitz working and printing on HP's website make for interesting viewing. Especially the parts about how he plans out a large show.

Caponigro's photometerHere's a good example of an odd category of collectible. I once heard from a guy who had Lee Friedlander's Leitz enlarging lens, and I myself owned the actor Jack Lemmon's M6 for a while. Years ago I visited Ralph Gibson at his studio in New York City, and in his darkroom he showed me an enlarger that I personally think should end up in the Smithsonian Institution one day—it was a Leitz 1C Ralph had bought from Robert Frank. Apart from being Ralph's own enlarger of choice for many years, it is the enlarger that had been used to print the original pictures from The Americans.

I hope somebody, somewhere, is keeping track of some of this stuff. The S.E.I. photometer, by the way, is an early spotmeter; Ansel Adams owned one.

Corporate Idiocy Run AmokT•Mobile and Deutsche Telecom have apparently trademarked the color magenta. There have supposedly been lawsuits already in the German courts over this. Proving that German courts have as little to do as American ones—and that we're all slowly going crazy.

In retaliation, I have named my car the "T-Mobile." Pronounced "tee-mo-BEEL," a pronunciation I intend to trademark...oh, okay, not really.

Withers at Panopticon The other day we noted the recent death of photographer Ernest C. Withers. Ronald Weinstock sent this link to some of Ernest's work, at Panopticon Gallery.

No more Kodak IR past 2007Kodak has announced that it will cease shipping Ektachrome 64 (EPR) and Ektrachrome 100 (EPN) at the beginning of 2008. That seems to be no great loss and part of a rational product consolidation, as the newer Ektachrome 100 Plus (EPP) remains. However it has also discontinued Kodak Infrared film (HIE) again, this time probably for good. Read about it from an HIE user at Wirehead Arts.

New Zeiss ZF-I industrial lensesCarl Zeiss has announced a new series of industrial lenses (for things like photogrammetry, QA, and astrophotography) in Nikon F mount. The lenses are silver in color, splashproof, dust-proof, and feature locking knobs for focus and aperture settings. The first three lenses to be made available in this form will be the 25/2.8, 28/2 (shown), and 35/2. Prices TBA.

Saturday, 10 November 2007

A couple more pictures from my stillborn Michigan project. Regarding the top picture, you have to see it larger to read the sign (see below). I suppose the homeowner meant his front yard, but from where the road dead-ended it sure looked like he had posted Lake Huron itself. (Ironic that the four states surrounding Lake Michigan are currently erecting legal 'Keep Out' signs directed at the parched Western states, which keep eyeing Great Lakes water. Why the U.S. keeps allowing development to continue unabated in the desert states is beyond me—it truly lacks common sense.)

Humans have a really annoying habit of dismissing that which they don't understand. I don't know if it's instinct or ego, but it's damn near universal. And it's really unfortunate, because it means they stop learning. Worse yet, they deride those who do learn and they stand in the way of intellectual advancement.

It's a strange and paradoxical thing. If you ask most folks to objectively and dispassionately evaluate their knowledge, they'll have no problem admitting there are folks in the world who know more than they do about most any subject. (The few who won't are to be shunned for one's own self-protection—their hubris is so great that they should always carry a lightning rod.)

I've never met anyone who was so smart they thought there was nothing more for them to learn. But there are people so dumb that they think so. I'm pretty sure none of them are reading this post. Honestly, is there anyone within eyeshot who thinks they know more than everyone else in the world about any subject (outside their sole, personal life, natch)? That's a rhetorical question.

By the same token, is there anyone here who really thinks that only art that has mass appeal for the "common man" is worthwhile, and all the rest is a fraud? I sincerely doubt it, too, unless someone really does think classical music, opera and ballet are con games. It's objectively provable that only a handful of a percentage of the population cares for any of these, and only some fraction of those actually understand them.

Okay, so let's take it as given that probably no one within the readership really thinks they know it all or truly believes that art is only for entertaining the masses. Can we consense on that?

Then why are any of you folks dismissing art you don't understand or don't appreciate as worthless?! Huh, riddle me that!

I've got my own answer. Deep within all of us is an Inner Yahoo. Some sort of proto-hominid vestige, a pink monkey syndrome. It's strange—better chase it off, for the good of the flock.

I'm not immune. I mentioned in a comment that by and large I don't like classical music. I think opera is simply silly. I don't get ballet at all; it goes completely past me to the point that explanations of it just sound like nonsense to me.

But that doesn't bring out my Inner Yahoo. You know what does?

Country & Western music.

My I.Y. thinks it's just dumb beyond belief, annoying as all hell, and a worthless waste of people's times, appreciated only by folks slightly more evolved than Neanderthals.

See, my I.Y.'s just as intolerant as yours. So what's the difference between thee and me? I know it's just my Inner Yahoo, and so I tell it to go to hell instead of trumpeting its ignorant prejudices to the world. Ol' I.Y.'s trying to make me look like a fool and I won't let it.

Well, I hereby liberate you all! Now you are aware of the demon within. Awareness is power; you don't have to let it out.

Featured Comment by John Frendreiss: "While I never knew its name before, I’ve been aware of my Inner Yahoo for quite some time. (It’s a distant cousin to my Inner Spoiled Rotten Brat, but that’s a whole other subject.) The worst thing about the Inner Yahoo is its ability to rise to the surface at the most inappropriate times, causing me to wreck perfectly good conversations by saying things that are amazingly idiotic. Usually, even I’m stunned. As the stupidity passes my lips, I know it's happening, but by then it’s too late. While the I.Y. slinks away back to its home (which I’m quite sure is near the middle of my body, in the back) I’m left standing in the uncomfortable silence, painfully aware of the furtive glances darting between those I’ve just offended. In that one mad moment, I have become: The Outer Yahoo. No matter how lucid and intelligent my repartee may have been up to that point, my forehead suddenly grows a few inches taller, bits of food materialize on my chin, and I develop a case of flatulence that’s positively deafening.

"Fortunately, experience has taught me to recognize the pending onset of the I.Y.’s influence and I quickly put my defenses into action. When I feel the I.Y. is about to have one of its shining moments, I simply close my mouth. I’m not always fast enough, but it’s getting away with less and less as each year passes.

"As a final thought, my I.Y. has asked me to point out that rap music is totally stupid."

Featured Comment by Sal Santamaura: "Not everyone is willing to suppress their Inner Yahoo. Buddy Rich shared Ctein's IY trigger. Reportedly, when being admitted to the hospital shortly before his death, Rich replied to a question about allergies by saying 'country music, ma'am, just country.' "

Featured Comment by Michael: "I have found remarkable value in C&W music. When I played it backward I got my truck back, my wife back, even my dog back."

Featured Comment by Lars Clausen: "Here's another angle: Maybe the art world has become (over I can't say how long) similar to the stock market, in that it feeds on its own predictions of what will become valuable. If people invest in art not because they like it, but because they think it will be worth more down the road than they pay for it now, it's no longer a question of understanding the art, but of understanding the art world. Total disconnect. Your feelings of whether a piece of art is 'good' may be right or wrong, but for pricing purposes they may well be irrelevant. The value of art is what somebody is willing to pay for it. Such a market (and I'm not saying that all art is treated that way) is something to stay away from unless you have extremely good salesman skills. Like day trading, it's a pyramid scheme that most people will lose money participating in. Notice that it is not required that the participants are aware of the scheming for such a scheme to be successfull. As long as enough people agree that a blurry photo of shit is worth a lot, it will be worth a lot. If they stop thinking it's worth a lot, the last buyer will be left with a blurry photo of shit that's worth...."

Thursday, 08 November 2007

Those who've been energized by our recent discussion about art, and who don't know Robert Adams's little book Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values, may want to take this opportunity to pick it up. It's a brief collection of beautifully-written little essays (sorry for repeating the adjective, but it's the only one that will do) by a prominent working art photographer. The book originally came out in 1981 and has already stood the test of time. It's very inexpensive to buy ($10.17 at the link) and easy to savor all at once or one essay at a time. Who knows how long this newest edition (which came out in 2005) will stay in print?

The essay that stands out most prominently for me over the years has been "Civilizing Criticism," but none of them will waste your time. Warmly recommended.

Wednesday, 07 November 2007

Thiago Sanna wrote:"The comments that followed the Greg Heins post
reminded me why I never really got involved with art in the past, and
why I still struggle with it while trying to be a photographer. From
one side, there are people who see the picture, don't like it, and then
wonder 'Oh, Mike likes it, so it must be good, and if I don't like,
then I must have an uneducated eye.' From the other side, there are
people arguing that the image should be good, because of this and that
rule.

"For me, it has been always a simple matter of taste; in music, in
literature, in movies and now in photography: I see/hear/read it, and
if it pleases me, then it's good...if it doesn't it's not. How can art
not be subjective?

"DISCLAIMER: I have no art background at all, so please feel free to
'educate' me. I would love to have an epiphany about all this; I just
don't see it coming."

-

Adam McAnaney replies: Thiago, I certainly understand where you're coming from. I’m a lawyer and
for most of my life I had little to no interest in art. Then I met my
wife, an art historian, and she has dramatically changed my view of
art, particularly because of her interest in modern art. I still don’t
know much about art, but I’m getting interested. Here are my thoughts:

First, I don’t think there is anything wrong with approaching art
the way you have been—i.e., do I like it or not? This is indeed a
very subjective approach, one based on your immediate emotional
response. This is still the way I approach most art, particularly the
thousands of random photographs that I view online.

But I would argue that much of art is interesting on an intellectual
level that has very little to do with whether you (or I, or anyone
else) like it or not. The problem is that in order to appreciate art on
this level, you have to: a) study art history, whether formally or
informally, e.g., through books, b) have access to a lot of an
artist’s work and have the time to study it and develop an independent
sense of what characterizes the artist’s work and what they were trying
to achieve, or c) get the artist to explain what she or he was thinking.

Let me try to give you a few examples. The artist Masaccio painted
beautiful paintings. But he is remembered today as the first artist to
use linear perspective. Realizing that he helped to change painting for
generations to follow helps us appreciate what he did. Michelangelo’s
David is treasured today, not only because a lot of people like it, but
because of the fact that Michelangelo chose to abandon the dictates of
strict proportionality in forming David’s limbs. Many Cubist paintings
are visually interesting, and you may like or dislike some of them on
an emotional level. But I found Cubist paintings much more interesting
when I found out that Cubism was a response to the problem of depicting
a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional canvas.

Now, I never would have figured out any of this stuff on my own. And
if you saw a Masaccio painting without any identifying information, you
would have no way of knowing whether it was painted by the innovator,
the first man to paint using linear perspective, or by your next-door
neighbor, who now takes linear perspective for granted, without even
thinking about it. But at least you can read about Masaccio,
Michelangelo and Picasso in books. Tons of literature exists to help
you place these artists in context. With contemporary art, most viewers
are left stranded, without a reference point to help them orient
themselves. This is aggravated by two things.

First, much contemporary art is not particularly concerned with
presenting something pleasing to look at. Instead, the work of art
embodies a thought process or philosophy, and is intended to provoke
the viewer into considering the concepts involved. The work of art
itself is just a starting point for getting people to think about
ideas. When Kasimir Malevich painted his Black Square, he wasn’t trying
to paint a black square as such. He was making a statement and wanted
viewers to consider his conceptual framework, Suprematism. You can’t
understand or appreciate the Black Square unless you know something
about Suprematism. But learning about Suprematism (or the ideas behind
any work of art) is a dual responsibility: the viewer has to take the
time to really engage with the artist, the work of art and the work’s
historical/artistic context, while the artist has to be willing to
engage in a real conversation and to openly discuss what he’s getting
at. This is where the second problem with contemporary art lies: far
too many contemporary artists are too lazy or too timid to really
discuss their work. It is very easy to throw up a work of art, call it
“Untitled #7” and claim, “My work speaks for itself.” It is very
difficult to take the time to work out a coherent aesthetic or concept,
and to then defend it against inevitable attack by critics.

On one level, we are very fortunate today. Art is probably more
accessible today than it has been at any point in history. And there
are more people who are engaging with art, on one level or another,
today than at any time in the past. But whereas in the past art was
created for and appreciated by a select elite with lots of free time,
who were generally educated on art on some level and who had the
opportunity to speak directly with the artists they commissioned,
today’s art audience is very different. Art history is disappearing
from public schools. As math and reading scores (appear to) have
dropped and as the focus on standardized tests has increased, schools
have attempted to raise their standing by devoting more time to basic
subjects, often at the expense of the arts. Budget cuts certainly have
not helped. So today art is being consumed by a far broader section of
society, but one that is less educated in art history, that has less
time to devote to understanding and appreciating art (given the demands
of work and family) and that generally views physical works of art in
museums, without ever seeing or speaking to the artist.

Many museums contribute to the problem, but not providing visitors
with any information other than the artist’s name, birthplace and birth
year, the name, date and dimensions of the artwork and the materials
from which it is constructed. How are you ever supposed to get to
Suprematism by reading “Kasimir Malevich, born in Kiev, 1878-1935,
Black Square, Oil on canvas, 1915, 53.5cm by 53.5cm”? I have never
understood why museums don’t provide more information to help the
viewer. But this is slowly changing. One of the greatest aids to the
appreciation of art in museums are those audio guides, where you punch
in the number below the artwork and get a little background. No
squinting at small text and jostling the crowds. I recently went to a
museum in Dresden that had two copies of the same painting. One by the
original artist, and a copy by artists working in his workshop. The
audioguide did a wonderful job of comparing the pictures and
contributing to an understanding of what was special about the artist’s
work. There is obviously a risk of these audioguides or accompanying
text giving the impression that only one interpretation is correct, and
of limiting the viewer’s freedom to interpret the work anew. But given
that most people seem to struggle with a lot of art, I think this is
the lesser of two evils.

One last note: the internet is obviously a great resource when it
comes to art. While viewing art on a computer screen obviously cannot
compare to seeing it in person, you have at your fingertips access to
representations of countless artworks and volumes of literature
analyzing and describing such art (though it is up to you to judge the
quality of such literature). In some ways, appreciators of photography
are particularly well off. Digital photography is obviously
particularly well suited to distribution over the internet. And given
that so many photographers have websites with e-mail addresses and/or
photoblogs with the opportunity to comment, it is possible to really
follow a photographer’s development and engage in a dialogue with
them. It’s really pretty amazing.

None of the above is necessary. You are obviously free to view art
and simply decide whether it appeals to you or not. Like I said, that
is still how I deal with most of the art I encounter. But if you take
the time to learn about the conceptual side of art, I think you will
find art a lot more interesting and fulfilling, and a lot less
frustrating. Plus, you will be amazed by how much art and artists
actually engage with the world. As contradictory as it may seem, the
more you get into the conceptual, the less abstract art seems. Art
doesn’t have to live in a bubble. And thinking about it will get you
thinking about other aspects of life.

_______________________

Adam

P.S. This is obviously just my point of view, and it isn’t a point
of view that necessarily lends itself to all kinds of art. I’m
generalizing here and I welcome responses from others describing how
they approach art. I would also like to thank my wife, who has really
opened my eyes and shaped my views on a lot of what I wrote above.

Adam McAnaney is an avid amateur photographer. He lives with his wife Elisabeth in Germany, where he works as a securities lawyer.

Featured Comment by Huw Morgan: "I've only two things to add to this entertaining thread: First, in response to Ctein's comment where he mentions his lack of affinity for classical music. One of the wonderful things about all art is that it rewards the investment in time in a linear fashion. I can guarantee that if you spend a few months going to a music appreciation course, it will open the door to enjoyment of classical music. If you spend 30 years studying classical music, you will reap the reward 30 fold. Ditto for any art form. Second, for Thiago who started all this, there is a very lovely set of DVDs produced by the BBC that gives you a pretty complete art history course in a box. It is narrated by an exuberant nun called Sister Wendy and follows the development of art from the prehistoric cave paintings of France to the present. It can be ordered here."

Comment by Mike:Re the discussion in the comments, Adam = rice, Player = fish. See "Prejudices #2" post for key to analogy....

Tuesday, 06 November 2007

(Note:This was also written in response to Thiago's question, now reproduced above. —MJ)

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Is art just a matter of taste? Isn't it all just subjective?

I can't answer those questions definitively, of course, but I've always felt it's somewhat similar to sexual attraction. There's rough agreement in the culture or among friends as to who's hot and who's not, but in the end, attraction is a very individual chemistry thing; same with art. Some people have very strong feelings, some don't; same with art. Some people are very picky, some not so much. Same with art. Some people want to learn all they can while others don't see the slightest point in that; same with art. Some people just can't get enough, some people aren't as concerned. Same with art. Some are voyeurs, others just want to participate. Some people have enormous experience and expertise, others are clumsy and have limited experience—neither is "better" than the other, as long as your own situation works for you, but there's no denying they're different. Same with art. Some people have very idiosyncratic taste; some people just care about what other people think; some people feel it's important to be conventional; some like to go along with the current styles and others like to buck the trends; some find something that works for them very early and stick with it their whole lives. Some people are downright kinky, and what they like offends other people. And so on. I'd argue that all of this has rough parallels to our reactions to art, our feelings toward it.

I've always seen our relationship to art as a sort of tug-of-war between unmoderated personal response (which is not as easy as it seems, because as a species we care very much what other people think of us and how we're being perceived) and what we can learn from connoisseurship and delectation and listening to the opinions and judgments of others. On the one hand it's just "this I like, this I don't" and on the other, you make yourself open to investigation and susceptible to being convinced by the art, its spread and reach and how it works. Both parts are important, in my view. With sushi, the Japanese talk about the balance between the fish and the rice; too much fish, the fish "wins"; too much rice, the rice "wins." In considering this yin-yang of "immediate response" and "deliberate connoisseurship," you want them to stay in balance, I think. Both are important, and both should be cultivated, but neither one should "win."

In the end, though, I think art satisfies an appetite. If I don't hear music for a week, I crave it. I crave taking, and looking at, pictures—I dream about shooting, even. If I haven't recently looked at enough pictures of the kind that please me, I feel the same sort of need as I feel when I'm deprived of music—I'll go out and find something to look at. I "read" photo books again and again like some people revisit favorite films or novels.

Your feelings might change, too, and you need to be open to that. You can fall into love with someone you've known for a long time as a friend, or fall out of love with someone you were once passionate about. You don't have to like the same pictures your whole life.

And you're not obligated to like every "good" photographer's work any more than you must think every movie star is attractive. You may have a "type" of photography that gratifies you most consistently, just like a man might prefer tall women or a woman might like deep voices. But keep an open mind. Don't be intolerant of others. Let your taste evolve, or your involvement deepen. Follow the glimmers of light from distant windows. Learn what you can about yourself, and the objects of your affection.

"Chain Link Sky" by Greg Heins. Check out his website, Greg Heins Photography. I also really like "Only" from the same portfolio. Like "Chain Link Sky," it's an example of the type of thing a great many photographers try, but very few make work. And there are some tree shots that make me smile...very playful. A lot to like here.

As for me, I've been suffering from writer's block for the past few days, but hopefully I'll recover soon.

Sunday, 04 November 2007

Organizer Brian Mosley and website owner John Foster have collaborated to present a very different kind of camera review on the biofos.com website. Brian's idea was to conduct a multi-user real world field trial of the Olympus E-3, in which independent real users would be encouraged to thrash the camera around and give their honest impressions. With Olympus U.K. cooperating, the event took place last weekend, and the results are on the web now, at the link.

I've just watched the ending to a most strange eBay auction. A used field view camera in like-new condition sold for $1,225. The strange thing about it was, the exact same camera brand new (that is, actually new, as opposed to like new) is available any time for $695.

Why would anybody want to pay $1,225 for a camera they could get for $695? Are they not yet initiated into the mysteries of that strange web function known as "Google"? Or is it just worth that much of a premium to them to "shop victoriously"?

This is hardly the only such example on eBay. I used to be mystified that used Ilford EM-10 enlarging meters would go for more on eBay than they cost new at B&H photo. And just a few days ago I watched a photography book sell for $49 after some fairly intense bidding—which is strange, since a quick search of both Abebooks and Alibris turned up perfectly fine overstock copies of the same book selling for $6 plus a few bucks postage (yes, I did check to see that there wasn't some minor but key difference that could account for the disparity. There wasn't. Same book, same edition, same condition).

I hardly think it's fair to provide links or call attention to specific instances of this—after all, all's fair in love and war, and it's not my place to queer a deal for a happy seller. It just seems very odd, is all.

Speaking of eBay, I've also always thought it would be fun to compile some examples of what I call "eBay howlers." (A "howler" in the field of copyediting is an error so egregious that it's funny; for example, the hapless writer who inserted a spurious "i" at a strategically unfortunate place in the phrase "fountain pens" and came up with something very different.) Here's a recent example of an eBay howler: the description that goes with the picture at left reads, "Bellows are a little crinkled." A little crinkled?!? Holy crap. Hard to say how they could be in much worse condition without being wadded up into a little ball. But who knows? Maybe this will go for more than the price of a brand new one anyway.

And so it goes.

_______________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Ailsa: "On the subject of howlers. Having worked in photography magazines for a number of years, I've had to become very conscious of the fact that the letter 'i' falls between 'u' and 'o' on the keyboard. It can be very easy to hit 'i' when in fact you were aiming for one of the letters either side. This one slip could give a whole new meaning to 'shutter speed', or a photographer who 'takes several shots from different angles.' Think about it...."

Thursday, 01 November 2007

Jim Lewis, writing in Slate, observes that all of Errol Morris's New York Times articles about the Fenton cannonballs, and all of the comments written in response, taken together, add up to approximately 223,000 words, making the whole shebang slightly longer than Melville's Moby-Dick.

When I wrote my first couple of books back in the late eighties, I found one of the most enjoyable aspects of being an author was the Event. This is publisher-speak for appearances in bookshops, talks, readings, lectures, literary festival on-stage interviews, plenary sessions, symposia and other such author-related public appearances. Each event would end with a signing. The queue would shuffle along, each customer would plonk a book down in front of me, we’d shoot the breeze for a while, author and reader in merry harmony, then they’d biff off to be replaced by the next in line. All very pleasant and genial. Occasionally, just every now and then, someone in the queue would have a camera and there would follow a rather complicated and painful procedure: the one with the camera, A, would have to find someone, B, willing to take a picture. Sometimes B would be the next person in the queue, often a member of the bookshop’s staff. B would be given the camera, while A would go behind the signing table to put an arm round me or a hand on my shoulder as I signed the book with a flourish while looking up into the lens grinning soupily. Of course B wouldn’t be acquainted with A’s particular make of camera. In fact B would give the impression of never having taken a picture before in his or her life. Wrong buttons would be pressed, extra shots would be taken ‘just to be sure’. The flash would fail to go off. A would have to go round the table again to twiddle with knobs and eventually, after much delay the business would be done. It wasn’t too disastrous, at most one or two people in the whole signing queue would be armed a camera. It wasn’t too awful an imposition.

But today …

Today everyone has a camera. They have a dedicated digital machine or something built into their mobile phone. As a result of this ubiquity the signing queue has become such a living hell that I don’t do them any more. All the pleasure has been sucked out. No agreeable exchanges and chats with the readers, nothing but the unspeakable horror of having to put up with 200 versions of the awkward and excruciating performance described above. The agony is especially exquisite given that the type of people who attend literary events and are interested in my books are precisely the type least competent at operating other people’s cameras. They may be able to use their own, but that’s of no importance because the crucial prize (which has all the point, purpose and value of twitching or train-spotting) is for the camera owner to be in the picture with the poor sap of an author. Given that the one thing that actors, writers and performers most hate (and I’m an extreme example) is having their photograph taken, life has now become a kind of living hell. It’s bad enough with professional photographers in studios (and believe me, it really is bad enough, I loathe the experience), but to have to freeze the face into something akin to a smile time after time after time while the bewildered operator footles uselessly about with the tiny little tits hat pass for buttons and switches. The photo software is so diabolically crap on most phones anyway (I have to say the Apple iPhone is astoundingly good in this respect, even a literary woman could operate it, and it is better quality than cameras with twice the pixel count) that you can hardly blame people for not being able to use it. It’s hardly surprising they switch it off every time they mean to shoot, or that the screen goes black or it’s in video mode or some other problem. It’s hardly surprising because as a piece of kit it’s bollocks. In the meantime the frozen smile fades, the queue behind gets restive and all the good vibes turn to bad.

But it doesn’t end there …

The camera and all its horrors are by no means confined to the literary events which one can (as I now do) decide to leave well alone. The fact is everybody has a camera whatever the time of day or night.

So ... a conversation is a rarity these days. Today it’s the crushing embarrassment of standing in the street like a gibbon while a total stranger accosts other total strangers and asks them to take a photograph. Crowds gather, what could have been a quick anonymous chat has become a full-on photo-op. ‘Me too!’ ‘Hold still!’ ‘Oh, and can you do a General Melchett “Baaah!” so I can use it as a ring tone? Hang on, where’s the recording app?’ ‘Say hello to my girlfriend, she doesn’t believe I’m talking to you.’ ‘Could you say in a Jeeves voice, “this is Kevin’s phone, the master is out so would you please be kind enough to leave a message?” Blinder!’ etc.

From time to time on the Internet, including several times in the comments to Ctein's post yesterday, I hear people wish that digital SLRs had an automatic "expose to the right" mode that would put the histogram right up to the right edge, meaning no highlight pixel would be saturated and the maximum value would be achieved for all the rest. Theoretically, for any given scene—even those that exceeded the dynamic range of your sensor—this would give you the most to work with in software, maximizing shadow detail and contrast and minimizing noise.

Sounds good, right? For many scenes it would be. Maybe it would even be useful, overall.

The reason it wouldn't work all the time is that there are plenty of occasions when you want your highlights to overexpose. In the kind of shooting I do, I encounter them often: A dusk scene sprinkled with pinpoint streetlights and house lights; a lonely winding road with a single car's headlights coming at you in the middle distance; backlit bright afternoon summer sunlight sparking on windswept water.

These are examples of the many scenes that have in them what are called "specular highlights," a generalized way of referring to accent highlights that are off the scale—the kind that in traditional black-and-white photography would be purposefully rendered as "paper white." If a camera's meter could detect these and put them within the scale of recordable values (tones)—"expose them to the right"—then the rest of the exposure might be so far wrong as to not be salvageable. The most common example is probably just the sun in the picture, assuming your lens is good enough not to flare out.

(Ansel Adams once performed an unusual virtuoso trick with the sun. Utilizing partial solarization, a peculiar property of film whereby extreme excess exposure not only triggers a failure of the reciprocity law but also results in less negative density, he created a picture (in Portfolio V, 1970) called "The Black Sun, Tungsten Hills, California," in which the disk of the sun is rendered near-black and the rest of the picture is exposed normally and not solarized. I suppose that's not really pertinent here, but it's a nice anecdote. Incidentally, Portfolio V was the first of Adams's portfolios he printed large, on 16x20 paper, and for which he used older negatives, and he committed to never printing any of those negatives again. Despite this limitation, few of them are now among the most valuable Adamses.)

-A picture of Adams you've never seen before: Ansel Adams, Photo Booth Self-Portrait, c. 1930, from the collection of the Archives of American Art, in the Katherine Kuh papers. If he could have obtained the negative from the machine, he probably would have tried to print it better!

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Last night I snapped the "record shot" shown above of our house all dolled up for Halloween (handheld at 1/5th of a second and dead sharp, O ye who doubt the usefulness of IS—but I digress. Again). In this shot, would you really want the camera to "place" the luminances of the electric pumpkin next to the steps "to the right," so that none of its pixels were saturated? If it had, I would have lost an unacceptable amount of shadow information off the left side of the histogram—much more than I actually already did lose. The picture would have been useless. There are many such situations in real-life shooting that would require operator intervention if such a feature existed. There's a reason why "averaging" metering is so effective.

Incidentally—I digress yet again—we had a nice Halloween, with about 250 trick-or-treaters. Generally, we have an exceptionally attractive cohort of rug rats in these precincts, and the little chuppers are very polite. For a while I had to stand out front, because a fair percentage of four- and five-year-olds find our house sufficiently scary that they won't come up to the door. The strangest things I saw were a) a teenager elaborately dressed as a toilet, and b) three middle-aged Hispanic women dressed in black plastic bags over their clothing actually asking for candy. I don't know—recent immigrants who aren't quite clued in to the subtleties of the holiday yet? Beats me. Apart from such anomalies it was a very social evening, a chance to see neighbors seldom seen, with family bands roaming up and down the streets and lots of animated conversation.

But back to our topic. Cameras do an awful lot for us these days—including, now, providing a near-instant "Polaroid" so you can check your composition and focus, and (on some cameras) tricolor histograms so you can check exposure in every color channel. Sci-fi stuff by the standards of, say, Ansel's lifetime. But no matter how much our cameras do for us, there's never—I mean never—going to be a mechanical-electronic means of getting every exposure just the way you want it, if only because "perfect exposure" is forever going to be partially a matter of taste and individual intention, at least occasionally. For better or for worse, the best way of creating the best exposure includes the application of of experience and judgment as well as the use of the measurement device between your ears along with all your other measurement devices...however sophisticated the latter might be.

____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Thom Hogan: Obviously, 'it wouldn't work all the time.' Current metering systems don't 'work all the time' either.

But would Mike object to an Ansel Adams Zone System spot meter that gave you a precise indication of where other values were if you were to assign one reading as Zone X or I? Somehow, I think not.

Because this is a highly visible site, I worry about seemingly outright rejection of an idea, as it often causes the camera makers to reject more than the basic idea. Let me see if I can explain.

One problem with digital is that it is indeed linear and so much of the lower half of tonal range is recorded in so few bits. Besides meaning less capable tone ramps, it also means a lower signal-to-noise ratio for the low exposure zones.

The other problem is this: we don't know what our cameras are telling us. That's particularly true if you shoot raw, as the histogram and highlights display isn't based upon the actual data, but an interpretation of the data (the embedded JPEG, demosaiced with the camera settings). Worse still, not a single manufacturer that I know of has revealed at what point their highlights display triggers. Essentially, the camera makers are assuming we're not very smart and they're trying to protect us from ourselves.

We really need several bits of information:

1. How much of the scene has photosite saturation (well overflow) in it.

2. Where that saturation lives in the scene.

3. What channel(s) that saturation lives in.

4. How much of the scene has photosite underutilization*.

5. Where that underutilization lives in the scene.

6. What channel(s) that underutilization lives in.

7. What the underutilization assumption is (and this is one that should be user changeable; some people have more aversion to noise than others).

8. Histograms on well data in the range between saturation and underutilization.

*We don't have a good name for this. I use underutilization as meaning the point at which the SN ratio drops below a certain point, essentially defining the point where pulling out additional detail is impossible to distinguish.

If Mike had all that information, he'd actually be more capable of interpreting whether the blowout his camera is telling him he has is really what he wants and whether the rest of the exposure is working. But we're not likely to get that information if camera makers think that anything relating to expose-to-the-right (ETTR) is going to be rejected by a significant portion of the shooting public.

In the picture he shows as an example, we've got a lot of the frame rendered essentially with no detail. He very well may want it to be that way (after all, Halloween is supposed to be spooky, and low/no detail is supportive of spooky), but let's say there was a face in one of the windows. Does he have it in his exposure in a way that he can work with it in post processing? You wouldn't know with the current camera exposure helpers. And, yes, an Auto ETTR would worsen that problem. More on that in a moment.

The point is that most of us who talk about anything related to ETTR really are asking for more, and more accurate, information about the exposure. Since in digital we can review the exposure immediately, it makes large sense to make sure that the information we have is optimal in that respect. It currently isn't.

The idea of an automatic expose to the right exposure mode is akin to Program exposure mode or (ahem) Scene exposure modes. It would thus obviously be targeted at novices who don't know what they're doing or don't want to think about anything more than where to point the camera (and quite frankly, it would need an automatic post processing companion to bring the exposure back to visually appealing).

Mike is right in that every time we cede control to an automatic control, we give up some of the decision-making that is integral to optimizing the making of a photograph. Sometimes we do that because we're not sure we can make those decisions fast enough (autofocus comes to mind), but most pros think seriously about as many of those decisions as they can for every picture they take.

Still, right now we have to guess as the accuracy of the information we're being given to evaluate our decision-making. I'd rather not guess. Give me the right data, presented correctly. If that means that we also get an Auto ETTR mode that I'll never use but might work for someone else, that's fine with me. I can ignore those (ahem) Scene exposure modes as long as I have P/A/S/M, for example, and ETTR is something along those lines: I can ignore Auto ETTR as long as I have the info that underlies it so that I can manually control it.

So let's not try to talk the camera makers out of exploring ETTR. Let's instead convince them that there are consumer and pro aspects of ETTR and we both want an optimal set of controls for it.